Of course, these are not life shattering querries about the top three subjects that people should never discuss. You know, religion, politics, abortion.

No, these are the three most visited questions that I see thrown about in the press, on blogs, on twitter, facebook, infomercials etc. on a daily basis. In fact billions of dollars change hands every year just to solve these issues.

So the saying goes,

You can never be too thin, too rich or too beautiful!

And people will PAY anything for even little bits of information they can get to be in one or all of these categories. But the amazing thing is that you can boil all the advice, all the books, manuscripts, lectures, webinars, infomercials, infotainers etc etc. down to just a few simple solutions.

So if you are ready for the multi-billion dollar solutions then read one.

Question 1: How to lose weight.

Billion dollar answer 1: Burn more calories than you take in.

Question 2: How do I get rich.

Billion dollar answer 2: Spend less than you earn.

Question 3: How do I have good relationships?

Billion dollar answer 3: Give more than you take.

So there you have it; these answers sum up the volumes of crap that people are dishing out now a days. Who da known that its just simple math? And now you can save all your money. But don’t tell the info marketers that I’m letting these secrets out because some of them are friends of mine and I don’t want them to know that it was me that put them out of business.

Most of you will of course be skeptical and go buy ten MORE books about how to lose weight or what ever. Go for it if it makes you feel better but I’d bet that all the other problems in life can be solved with solutions that are just as simple. Its just that most people want “a magic” pill and don’t want to do the simple math. Or they think that solutions have to be complicated to work. Here’s what Einstein has to say about it all:

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”

This is one of my favorite stories and I got it from Chip and Dan Heath and the book “Made to Stick“. I highly encourage you to buy it and check out the website for other great “insights”. I’ve used this story in presentations and it always makes people think about how they are communicating with their kids, spouse, co-workers, boss, audience etc. http://www.madetostick.com/

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tappers” or “listeners.” Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as “Happy Birthday to You” and “The StarSpangled Banner.” Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener’s job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped. (By the way, this experiment is fun to try at home if there’s a good “listener” candidate nearby.)

The listener’s job in this game is quite difficult. Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only 2.5 percent of the songs: 3 out of 120.

But here’s what made the result worthy of a dissertation in psychology. Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, Newton asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted that the odds were 50 percent. The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2. Why?

When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head. Go ahead and try it for yourself — tap out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s impossible to avoid hearing the tune in your head. Meanwhile, the listeners can’t hear that tune — all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code.

In the experiment, tappers are flabbergasted at how hard the listeners seem to be working to pick up the tune. Isn’t the song obvious? The tappers’ expressions, when a listener guesses “Happy Birthday to You” for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” are priceless: How could you be so stupid?

It’s hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.

The tapper/listener experiment is reenacted every day across the world. The tappers and listeners are CEOs and frontline employees, teachers and students, politicians and voters, marketers and customers, writers and readers. All of these Groups rely on ongoing communication, but, like the tappers and listeners, they suffer from enormous information imbalances. When a CEO discusses “unlocking shareholder value,” there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can’t hear.

It’s a hard problem to avoid — a CEO might have thirty years of daily immersion in the logic and conventions of business. Reversing the process is as impossible as un-ringing a bell. You can’t unlearn what you already know. There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them.

This book will teach you how to transform your ideas to beat the Curse of Knowledge. The six principles presented earlier are your best weapons. They can be used as a kind of checklist. Let’s take the CEO who announces to her staff that they must strive to “maximize shareholder value.”

Is this idea simple? Yes, in the sense that it’s short, but it lacks the useful simplicity of a proverb. Is it unexpected? No. Concrete? Not at all. Credible? Only in the sense that it’s coming from the mouth of the CEO. Emotional? Um, no. A story? No.

Contrast the “maximize shareholder value” idea with John F. Kennedy’s famous 1961 call to “put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade.” Simple? Yes. Unexpected? Yes. Concrete? Amazingly so. Credible? The goal seemed like science fiction, but the source was credible. Emotional? Yes. Story? In miniature.

Had John F. Kennedy been a CEO, he would have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives.” Fortunately, JFK was more intuitive than a modern-day CEO; he knew that opaque, abstract missions don’t captivate and inspire people. The moon mission was a classic case of a communicator’s dodging the Curse of Knowledge. It was a brilliant and beautiful idea — a single idea that motivated the actions of millions of people for a decade.